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Best Books for Elective Rotations and Sub-internships

First, my book recommendations for the core third-year clerkships can be found here. What follows are “best” book recommendations geared for MS3/MS4 elective rotations and sub-internships (“sub-i’s”), including most of the surgical and medical subspecialties. Some of these books are geared for medical students; others more for residents. I’ve done my best to include both when appropriate, including a first buy single resource when possible and alternates and options for further reading when necessary. For more info about methodology, feel free to peruse this.

Let me preface this list by saying that a typical student on a normal rotation in a field outside their main interest does not need to buy anything. Even in a field of interest, many (most?) students will simply wait to buy books until they have a book fund during residency and will nonetheless succeed. No one has a monopoly on medicine and medical knowledge; in 2016, you don’t need to buy anything simply for your education if there isn’t an important test at the end of it.

As a general rule, you will rarely go wrong reading UpToDate for your typical brownie point efforts (particularly in non-surgical fields). As a matter of gamesmanship, you of course never say, “UpToDate says,” you merely state the information as a fact, occasionally referencing “reading” you did or “studies have shown.” It works well to click on the link to the footnote on anything you feel might net you a gold star, click on the reference, then browse the abstract. Then you could say, “a big RCT in Sweden demonstrated…” and if anyone pushes you on details you didn’t glean from the abstract, you simply say, “good question – I don’t recall – I’ll need to go back and look further.”

It should also be said: your success on your rotations has much more to do with how you function as a human being than how many facts you know.

Internal Medicine (general approach)

If your institution pays for it, plenty of further reading (including Harrison’s, for example) is available through AccessMedicine.

Surgical subspecialties (general approach)

Most medical students during surgical sub-Is should probably focus on anatomy and bread & butter pathology. The mini sections found in Crush Step 2 would be a reasonable start for the latter that would take you literally a few minutes. Obviously, that’s not much of a foundation, but you could do at least that before starting your rotations. But really, I can’t stress this enough: anatomy.

Emergency Medicine

Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine is cheaper than Rosen by a huge margin, but neither should be purchased without a book fund. And as “Bibles,” both are more than two thousand pages and longer than you could hope to get through.

Hematology/Oncology

Neurology

For third years: Can start with Blueprints Neurology for a quick summary. Otherwise, go straight to PreTest if you’ll be taking a shelf. Focus on the subjects you feel least comfortable about (e.g. movement disorders) since it’s often difficult to churn through a whole PreTest book.

OB/Gyn

Otolaryngology (ENT)

For further study, the consensus would then point you to Pasha or the Handbook of Otolaryngology. Pasha is by far the more popular but also isn’t available for Kindle; the Handbook assumes a bit less on your part and may be more readable for most students.

8 Comments

I’d like to add some sources:http://Www.123sonography.com offers cheap echo courses that I have had enormous use of as a physician. Expensive though if you want to dig deeper into their courses.

MedMaster.com appears to be the same gang, looks good, somewhat expensive.

For those who need to step up their ECG game I recommend http://www.ecgwaves.com (free e-book, extensive material) or Galen Wagner’s book which I forgot the title of, but it’s amazingly well written. Dale Dubin’s book is great until you actually meet a patient, then you’ll notice its blatant shortcomings. Another great book is Ary L Goldbergers ECG a simplified approach.

Good question. Most medicine books have chapters on ID, including Harrison’s, so the ID chapter from whatever larger text you have should be pretty good. The big reference would be Mandell, but I wouldn’t bother even going to the library for that on a short elective.

Antimicrobial stewardship changes quickly, so it’s hard for a textbook to keep up. The only book I’d considering buying if you don’t have it would be the The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy to keep in your pocket, which is updated annually.